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building a healthy information ecosystemThu, 10 Nov 2016 01:27:04 +0000hourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1Comment on Trump’s victory: the morning after by Gregg Rosenberghttp://www.shoutingloudly.com/2016/11/09/trumps-victory-the-morning-after/comment-page-1/#comment-155251
Thu, 10 Nov 2016 01:27:04 +0000http://www.shoutingloudly.com/?p=2033#comment-155251My wife directed me to this blog because you’ve written — very eloquently and directly, I’ll say — the thoughts that have been going through my mind all day that I’ve been sharing with her. I hope this finds a wide audience. I’m going to share on my FB feed.
]]>Comment on Trump’s victory: the morning after by Mike Fremonthttp://www.shoutingloudly.com/2016/11/09/trumps-victory-the-morning-after/comment-page-1/#comment-155250
Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:40:32 +0000http://www.shoutingloudly.com/?p=2033#comment-155250No one seems to address the 3 prime issues facing the world, where we have been among the leaders, and we are many years overdue in taking action:
Global warming..nuclear war..population growth to 9 billion in roughly 30 years.

All other concerns recede into inconsequence.

]]>Comment on Trump’s victory: the morning after by David Karpfhttp://www.shoutingloudly.com/2016/11/09/trumps-victory-the-morning-after/comment-page-1/#comment-155249
Wed, 09 Nov 2016 21:49:38 +0000http://www.shoutingloudly.com/?p=2033#comment-155249I think that’s right, JKD. Obamacare will be the test case of whether they care at all about governance/policy response, or if they’re just going to break shit and declare victory.
]]>Comment on Trump’s victory: the morning after by jkdhttp://www.shoutingloudly.com/2016/11/09/trumps-victory-the-morning-after/comment-page-1/#comment-155248
Wed, 09 Nov 2016 20:20:27 +0000http://www.shoutingloudly.com/?p=2033#comment-155248Yeah pretty much.
I’m interested specifically in what happens when the GOP repeals Obamacare, and moves Medicare to block grants. Lots of hospitals will shut down and lots of insurers will lay off a lot of people as they both reduce capacity from previous Medicare business, and restrict their risk pool to only the lowest-risk and highest-margin. This will only further tank lots of local economies, but especially in lots of red-state small-to-medium towns and cities where health care is the only major employer.
So… what do they do, then? You can kind of repeat this across every major area of policy but my guess is it happens to health care first.
]]>Comment on Tech criticism done badly by alan rosenblatthttp://www.shoutingloudly.com/2016/06/27/tech-criticism-done-badly/comment-page-1/#comment-154983
Mon, 27 Jun 2016 18:53:46 +0000http://www.shoutingloudly.com/?p=2028#comment-154983Brilliant critique, Dave.
]]>Comment on No, Politico, Google Can’t Rig the 2016 Election (without trying REALLY hard, at least) by Paul Robinsonhttp://www.shoutingloudly.com/2015/08/21/no-politico-google-cant-rig-the-2016-election-without-trying-really-hard-at-least/comment-page-1/#comment-152949
Sun, 30 Aug 2015 14:56:21 +0000http://www.shoutingloudly.com/?p=2003#comment-152949Politico article on How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election

The study behind this and the advocacy essay written by the researcher are incredibly, even ridiculously flawed. Here are just some of the issues. The results don’t withstand even passing scrutiny.

1. In his study, he used a search engine that provided only 6 results on a page. Artificial and much different from Goigle itself.

2. Please the researcher. Give ’em what he wants. Especially likely when seeing such a big impact in a short time with little input.

5. Assumes Google results are the primary source of information for voters–silly! People go to news sites, candidate sites, etc. They may not be using Google much at all. So, even if true, the hits are only a small part of information–and info is in turn only a small part of what affects voting.

6. If using Google results, doesn’t say what voters do with info they get to.

7. Ignores that negative stories can trend and lead results–key is what is found and what is made of it.

8. Indian example is correlation; a candidate doing better will get better and more coverage.

9. Recent report showing nearly 2/3 of major studies in leading psychology journals not replicable!

10. Political bias in examples! Each one raises the spectre of Google conspiring to manipulate mass opinion in Democratic directions. Reveals a lot about his motives in doing the research. Did Roger Ailes and Fox News fund him?! 🙂 Be more worried about outright electronic voting machine hacking.

Bottom line: have fun talking about this around the water cooler or online, but don’t believe it for a minute!!

The big advances in voter modeling over the past couple of elections (see Eitan Hersh’s “Hacking the Electorate for an overview) have mostly come through modeling data based on the voter file (who has voted in past elections + party registration in some state + demographic data in some states). They create predictive models that rate individuals on a scale of 0-100 for the likelihood to vote and their likelihood of voting D vs R. Particularly in the states that collect party registration data, these models are really quite good.

Since we know a fair amount about who undecided voters will be (and this is a well-established literature dating back to Philip Converse’s pathbreaking work in the 1960s), we can also make some well-founded claims about how often and in what ways those voters interact with political information (Delli Carpini and Keeter wrote an award-winning book about this in 1996, “What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters. Also see Bimber and Davis’s 2003 book on the web’s use in political campaigns).

These are central works in the literature on political communication and elections. They represent established, bedrock knowledge. Voters don’t approach each election anew and start gathering information about the candidates. They develop civic habits, preferences, and beliefs over time, and those habits structure how they engage with politics and political campaigns.

So, quite apart from the technical aspects of what Google can or does do with its political search offerings, if an experiment is going to have external validity, it has to not violate our core assumptions about political information-gathering. Epstein’s study mimics a low-information voter scenario (because he’s intentionally using candidates from other countries so his research subjects won’t have strong existing opinions), but then presumes that these voters will spend their time googling for election information. That heightens the statistical significance of his findings, but creates a scenario so artificial that it would virtually never occur in the real world.

I think you focus too much on Epstein’s motives and you miss his points, weakening yours. The argument about “Undecided voters are overwhelmingly low-information voters” is not a strong one because we cannot be sure who will be the undecided voters in 2016. Maybe they are misinformed voters getting their information through facebook which could be compromised. Maybe they are those trusting Google regularly and Google is misleading them. Google has been spammed in the past, and still is – that’s what SEOs (Search Engine Optimization companies) do.

One should note, and this is important, that Google has been fixing its search results when it comes to political searches. There is no much influence to its search results of politicians because it has a strict formula on how to allocate the top-10 results. And we have evidence of that. See, for example, Network Manipulation (with application to political issues) http://bit.ly/NRmNox
It tries to be “fair” and consistent in the top-10 results so that no negative or unofficial information appears. If Google suddenly started “unfixing” its political search results, I would be alarmed.

For the record, I have had this discussion in a sequence of emails with Epstein in the past, some of it reported in the Washington Post http://wapo.st/1NzFn85 Interestingly enough, Epstein chose not to reference my paper in his, and even misspelled my name in the “acknowledgements”. Unfortunately, the PNAS review process is not as thorough as it should be.

]]>Comment on No, Politico, Google Can’t Rig the 2016 Election (without trying REALLY hard, at least) by Whitneyhttp://www.shoutingloudly.com/2015/08/21/no-politico-google-cant-rig-the-2016-election-without-trying-really-hard-at-least/comment-page-1/#comment-152872
Mon, 24 Aug 2015 20:24:26 +0000http://www.shoutingloudly.com/?p=2003#comment-152872Totally agree with you on this, David. Great post. But I prefer the term “straw person”.
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